sewts is turning towel-feeding robots into a laundry automation layer

sewts.VELUM feeds towels and other terrycloth into folding machines at up to 700 textiles per hour, with a one-day setup time. The product handles textiles from 30 by 30 centimeters to 100 by 200 centimeters and up to 3 kilograms, addressing a laundry workflow that remains stubbornly manual even after washing and drying are automated.

sewts was founded in Munich in 2019 and launched its first series-ready product in 2022. Co-founder and CEO Alexander Bley has positioned the company around robotic handling of deformable materials, where every contact changes the shape of the object. The company raised EUR7 million in Series A funding in August 2023 to roll out VELUM across international laundries.

The task is narrower than general textile automation and harder than it looks. A towel has to be picked, spread, oriented, and fed without wrinkles into a folding machine. Industrial laundries often automate washing, drying, and folding mechanics, while people still stand at feeding stations. sewts says 30% of personnel costs can come from equipping folding machines, which gives VELUM a clear labor-cost surface.

The product page states that VELUM can outperform manual labor after 1.5 to 2.5 years depending on workload. Public customer logos include Stangelmayer, Aschenbrenner, Korian, and Greif. Those references show laundry-market exposure, though they do not disclose installed unit counts, utilization, or payback by customer.

The competitive field includes manual laundry feeding, Jensen and Kannegiesser laundry automation systems, textile handling robotics research, SoftWear Automation-style fabric manipulation, and custom integrators building feeding cells. sewts' distinction is a focused deformable-material system for towel feeding, not a general sewing or garment robot.

Public material does not show installed unit count, uptime by laundry, textile error rate by item type, maintenance burden, customer-level payback, pricing, contract retention, or the sensing method VELUM uses to identify grasp points. The strategic test is whether sewts can turn deformable-material handling into a repeatable laundry product. If VELUM keeps feeding towels through full shifts with low operator attention, sewts becomes a labor automation layer for industrial laundries rather than a textile robotics research story.

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